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Business reasons for taking the environment seriously

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "We believe that there are five forces shaping the world of work right now, we call them the tides of change. And the E in that acronym is the environment. Now, this is, to be honest, probably one of the most obvious of these forces. You can’t really talk about the future without talking about the environment. Unfortunately I think we’ve almost overdone it because we often get people rolling their eyes and they’re expecting, you know, a picture of a drowning polar bear inside. Those things are important, issues around climate change changing weather patterns and the use and abuse of natural resources. That’s the big thing of the environment. And we are living an unsustainable life at the moment on this planet. But it isn’t just about the Greenpeace message, as important as I think that is. We actually believe that until businesses see the business benefit of environmental issues, that we’re not really going to see much of a change. And so our message is very simple, there are real business reasons for taking environmental issues seriously."

Business reasons for taking the environment seriously

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "We believe that there are five forces shaping the world of work right now, we call them the tides of change. And the E in that acronym is the environment. Now, this is, to be honest, probably one of the most obvious of these forces. You can’t really talk about the future without talking about the environment. Unfortunately I think we’ve almost overdone it because we often get people rolling their eyes and they’re expecting, you know, a picture of a drowning polar bear inside. Those things are important, issues around climate change changing weather patterns and the use and abuse of natural resources. That’s the big thing of the environment. And we are living an unsustainable life at the moment on this planet. But it isn’t just about the Greenpeace message, as important as I think that is. We actually believe that until businesses see the business benefit of environmental issues, that we’re not really going to see much of a change. And so our message is very simple, there are real business reasons for taking environmental issues seriously."

Retail naive to blame the recession

GRAEME CODRINGTON:
"The retail industry is really going to be impacted by technology over the next few years. The economic downturn has meant that what we call here in the UK, high street stores, your big shopping districts have really been hit. And we’ve been able to blame the recession for this. But I don’t think in a few years time that it’s going to recover because what people have done during the downturn has become a lot more confident and comfortable with online shopping."

Budgets suspended with unknown future

GRAEME CODRINGTON:
"When we look at the near future, the next decade for example, it is sometimes sort of a blank wall and I think that’s where a lot of businesses find themselves at the moment. They don’t really know what the future is like. So the evidence of this is they’re holding back on budgets. There’s more money in the world of work now than there’s been for a long time, companies sitting on piles of cash and their balance sheets looking pretty good. But they’re not spending it because they have a sort of mentality to say, “Well let’s see what’s going to happen.” And they’re doing that because they don’t know what’s going to happen. The old ways of looking at the future, the old ways of setting strategies, which is essentially take 80% of what we’re doing already, try and improve on it to give me a 10% return on my annual investment of energy, and then we’ll all be okay Well that’s out the window, we live in a world where the old rules are no longer applicable."

Humans desire to connect

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "Throughout history, human beings have had a desire to connect with each other. And I believe that what’s going on with social media is that we now have just found the very best way, so far, in history to make that connection. So to put it another way, I don’t believe that facebook is heading to a billion users, because it’s great technology. I don’t think it’s because some nerd who dropped out of Harvard came up with a great piece of software that we now suddenly have all of this interest. I actually think it’s been driven by a very human desire to connect with people and some nerd has found a technology solution to make that happen."

Social tools are behaviours, not marketing channels

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "facebook is not even a channel, it’s actually a behaviour. And companies don’t understand this. Companies are trying to treat facebook like a channel, they’re trying to work out how do you do marketing? How do you do recruitment through this social media space? I mean I say facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the others are going to be in the same category. They are behaviours that have simply found technologies to make them happen. And that means that companies really need to adjust their attitudes. This is what we call beyond the hype. We need to go beyond the hype of the 13 million so-called social media experts listed on Google, who will come in and tell you how you can increase sales and how you can increase staff retention. Maybe you can do those things. But on a long-term basis something else is going on in social media. It’s about building communities. It’s about engaging, interacting, involving people in conversations. It’s about connection. And these are not things that you then use in your marketing team or your HR strategy. These are ways of living, ways of engaging, and that’s the mind set shift, that needs to take place. These are not technologies, these are behaviours and we need to adjust our behaviour and attitude to match the technologies that are available."

Retail stores of the future

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "Retail stores of the future are only going to need one item of each of the products they sell because people still want to go and feel and smell and touch and maybe even try on various objects. But you don’t need to have a whole warehouse and a whole storage facility because people will do that, make the purchase and then obviously have it home delivered. This happening all the time, I see it with the younger generation where they go into a store, they’re browsing but while they’re browsing they’ve got their smartphone and they’re double-checking comparative prices. They might even be ordering from Amazon while they’re standing in your store. They are certainly checking quality and they are bypassing your entire sales mechanism as a retail store because they just take a photograph of the barcode and download all the information from the International Barcode Registry. And so they don’t need to speak to your salesperson. In addition, they’re looking at online reviews and looking at 100 other peoples’ opinions on the product in their store. And that’s while they’re standing in your store. So even if you can get people into your retail environment you have no guarantee that they’ll buy from you or in any way be loyal to you. And just those two thoughts, online we’ve known for a long time is going to threaten the retail store itself. But what people actually do while they’re physically in your store is dramatically changing with smartphones now. And retailers are going to have to get their heads around it. They’re going to have to give people a new reason for coming to the store, that reason is not about buying your products, it has to be something else. You have to be giving them an experience and engagement and interaction, something more than just a purchasing opportunity."

One object will dominate future commerce

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "One of the most remarkable technologies of the next few years is going to be something called 3D printing. If you haven’t seen this, do a quick Google search or do a search on YouTube for some 3D printing examples and be prepared to have your mind blown. This is literally taking something the size of an old inkjet printer and instead of using ink cartridges you use cartridges with composite materials or plastics or even molten metal and you literally print out physical products and objects layer by layer. And within 20 minutes you’ve got a usable object, you could have a glass if you’re inviting people over for dinner and you don’t have enough glasses, you just print them out and 20 minutes time you’ve got a glass or two extra. Now, if you can think that we could have a factory in our kitchens in every home well that’s going to have a huge impact on the manufacturing industries, on China and all the other Asian countries who are giving us cheap manufacturing now, with huge impact, shipping and logistics. So there’s a whole scud of industries that could be affected by just one invention, by just one object. And that object is coming soon to a home near you."

Music industry chaos the first digital revolution

GRAEME CODRINGTON: "The best examples of structural change are those industries that we can already see have been impacted by the digital revolution. Your best examples there come out of the entertainment industries. So music for example, is an industry that just is in chaos at the moment, I mean they don’t know how to make money anymore, they don’t know where their income streams come from. They’re the only industry in the world who are currently suing their own clients, you know it’s crazy. But they really don’t know how to make money at the moment. And we’re going to see a lot more chaos in the music industry because they’re not innovating, they’re not working out new ways of getting income, they’re not working out new ways of connecting with clients. And of course because of how they’ve handled themselves over the last decade or so, most of their customers are very comfortable ripping them off and downloading stuff for free and so on. So it’s a mess. But it’s easy to look at that industry and of course DVDs and the movies industry are following close behind them and close behind them are the newspapers and the magazines. And it’s easy to laugh at them, but every other industry has the potential to be digitised in pretty much the same way. So even the medical profession which you’d think, well, that’s not going to really going to be digitised, it can be done at a digital distance. The type of advice you get from your general practitioner, you can get via Skype from anyone in a call centre anywhere. You might not prefer it that way, but it is accessible that way. And so you think of any industry you like and this digitisation has the potential to disrupt your industry as much as it has disrupted the entertainment industry in the last decade."

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